d3RPG – Crackpot Studioshttp://crackpot.studio
Turning Imagination to CreationMon, 03 Dec 2018 09:53:58 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.9https://i1.wp.com/crackpot.studio/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/cropped-Big.png?fit=32%2C32d3RPG – Crackpot Studioshttp://crackpot.studio
3232145245443Inspirational Audiohttp://crackpot.studio/2018/06/01/inspirational-audio/
http://crackpot.studio/2018/06/01/inspirational-audio/#respondFri, 01 Jun 2018 08:15:01 +0000http://crackpot.studio/?p=219Just a super-quick post this week – although I’ve still been finding time to work on the d3RPG system, I haven’t really got anything to show for it thanks to a crazy week at work.

However – said crazy week has provided me with about 6 hours of driving, which I usually fill with podcasts (Glass Cannon, Called Shot and On The Shoulders of Dwarves are my main fodder). But this week I was all caught up with nothing to listen to. Instead, I turned to Spotify.

At some point in the past I managed to find a few extensive playlists suited to tabletop gaming:

It was while listening to this last list that I heard a track called “A Hero’s Quest” by Peter Crowley.

﻿

Before I forgot what it was I was listening to, I dove into Spotify to see if there were any other tracks from the same artist. Lo and behold, there were LOTS. I set about adding them to my queue, and what I found was perfect inspiration not only for those many hours of driving, but also for generating ideas for Perks and entire storylines in d3RPG.

My favourite album so far is probably Youtube Collection #6 – the primary source for the track I’ve already specifically called out above. However, it’s definitely worth taking the time to check out all his works – go do it now. If Spotify isn’t your cup of tea, he’s also quite active on Youtube.

While you do that, I’ll leave you with one more track which has given me some major, exciting ideas for the d3RPG setting.

﻿

Yours in Adventure,

Shane

]]>http://crackpot.studio/2018/06/01/inspirational-audio/feed/0219Magic, Magic Everywherehttp://crackpot.studio/2018/05/25/magic-magic-everywhere/
http://crackpot.studio/2018/05/25/magic-magic-everywhere/#respondFri, 25 May 2018 09:00:54 +0000http://crackpot.studio/?p=209Only a short blog post this week, and not really any pictures, as I have been (and as of the time of writing, still am) away for work all week. While suffering from a cold. Air travel when your sick is definitely not fun…

Anyway, while I’ve been sitting here in my motel room of an evening feeling sorry for myself, I haven’t really had much of a chance to work on anything solidly, but I have managed to start thinking about the magic system for d3RPG.

I really want the system to feel fantastical – the characters you play are NOT normal, everyday folks. One thing that I want to do to help achieve this feeling is to make magic available to any character – to suffuse it throughout the system. Of course, this is slightly complicated by wanting to keep the system setting-neutral. How do you explain magic in a modern setting? Or a space-based game? Reflavoring things can only go so far. I guess that’s a problem for another day. For the moment, let’s work on the assumption of a default Fantasy setting.

In the Land of Defaultia, anyone can wield powerful, reality-shaping magic. Some folks might call it sorcery, or witchcraft, or any of a thousand other names. We’ll keep it simple and just call it Magic. After all, while there’s a lot of things in Defaultia that aren’t default, a lot of things are. Anyway…

Accessing Magic

So everyone is going to have access to magic, and as previously established, there is not going to be the traditional idea of Classes either. In that case, how will this work mechanically?

It’s not all that complicated, really. If your character meets the required prerequisites, she can simply take the Perk for the spell she wants to cast. (Perks, remember, are similar to Pathfinders Feats, or Savage World’s Edges). The primary prerequisite is fairly obvious if you think back to the Skills blog post. Give up yet? It’s your Spellcraft skill.

Of course, pumping up you Spellcraft skill to meet prerequisites is going to affect the number of character points you can spend in other areas such as “not being squishy” or “smarter than a crayon” (Another memory prompt – Spellcraft is linked to your Spirit attribute, not your Mind, so you can be perfectly stupid as a character, and still wield magic). It’s going to be a balancing act for both myself from the design perspective, and for any future players who are dumb enough to test this game excited to play something new.

Limiting Power

I refer often to Pathfinder, in case you haven’t noticed, because it’s both wonderfully deep and crunchy, and where I’ve spent the large majority of my RPG time. Pathfinder does, however, have a reputation for making spellcasters significantly more powerful than non-spellcasters at higher levels. I’m hoping to account for that not via a traditional Vancian spell slot system, but through having a risk of failure when casting a spell, and penalties associated with said failure.

The easiest way to explain this will be to provide you with an example spell Perk:

And now that we’ve got this far, I realise that this is the first time I’ve shown you ANY Perk, not just a magical one. Never mind! Just think of it as a birthday present. Or Christmas. Or something more to your liking.

Anyway, let’s take a look at what we have here:

This is a Perk called “Lightning Bolt”, which costs 3 points to purchase, with a prerequisite of Spellcraft 4 (meaning 4 “levels” of the Spellcraft skill have been purchased).

When this spell is cast, one opponent needs to make a Dexterity test with a target of 9 (ie, they fail if their 3d3! + Dexterity + Perks is 8 or less). If they do fail, they take 1 point of Body damage.

Additionally, you need to make a Spellcraft roll yourself, with a target of 9. If you fail, you take 1 point of Body damage as well, as the electrical discharge flows through your own body as well as (or possibly instead of) your target.

Everything has it’s price

You can see here that even if you fail your Spellcraft roll, your spell will still trigger, occur, activate, or happen. What your spellcraft test is representing isn’t so much your ability to cast the spell, but your ability to do so SAFELY.

In a Vancian system, you have a certain number of potent spells you can cast each day. In the d3RPG system, you can cast all day, every day – if you want to risk the damage to your own mortal container. And remember – if you’re spending points on increasing your Spirit attribute so that you can improve your Spellcrafting skills, in order to purchase new spell Perks, then chances are good that your Body attribute is if not neglected, then at least not your primary focus. While you CAN cast spells all day, do you want to risk three or four failures in quick succession, putting you out of the fight by your own hand?

Of course this is all theoretical at the moment, as nothing is well-developed enough yet for playtesting or balancing. So make sure you stay tuned for the inevitable “I’ve got egg on my face” post as this all comes crashing down when reality and probability all sets in.

Uh, ahem, sorry. Now that you’re here, you’ll have to excuse my little distraction. I’ve been promising for a couple of weeks now to talk about Skills in d3RPG, so I guess I’m out of excuses by now. Skills are one of the primary ways you interact with the world so it’s only fair if we go into a bit of detail on them.

Skills – what are they?

The concept of Skills is a pretty central one in the world of RPGs. Skills take the incredibly, uncountably, mind-bogglingly vast number of things you can do in the world, and distil this potential into a manageable list of mechanical actions. Sounds riveting, right? Let’s make it simpler – for the most part, any time you want to have an impact on the world, you roll against a Skill in some way.

Feel like climbing a tree? You’ll need to make a Climb check. Or maybe an Acrobatics.

If you’re trying to negotiate a price with a merchant, you might need to test against your Barter, Appraise, or Persuade skill.

When you’re delving deep, deep into the lost mysteries in an ancient library, you could be testing your Knowledge, Research or Librarian skills.

You might even use your Arcana or Spellcraft skills if you’re attempting to create a new spell to help you remember the dozens of different Skills available to you.

Every system has a different list of Skills, and they each have either more or less detail and mechanics involved in how you use them. For example, take a look at the Craft Skill in Pathfinder, my system of choice. You’ll be a while, but it’s OK. I’ll wait here.

When you get back, compare it to the Athletics Skill in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. You’ll quickly see that there’s a lot less detail there.

Part of this difference in level of detail is down to the method of presentation – Pathfinder “front loads” lots of data and mechanics on the player, while D&D presents players only with what they really need at the time. However, there’s also a philosophical difference in the systems here. D&D is designed to be much more streamlined than previous versions to lower the barrier to entry, while Pathfinder embraced the options and details available in systems of yore.

By the numbers, Pathfinder has 26 main skills, some of which are broken down into significant lists of sub-skills in their own right. On the other hand, D&D 5e has a relatively paltry 18 core skills.

On the left, D&D’s short skill list, compared to the extensive Pathfinder list on the right.

There’s no objectively correct skill list – the size of a skill list and the skills that are included are all going to depend upon the type of game you want to play.

d3RPG reduces the list even further. Taking inspiration from Sagaborn’s list of just nine skills, d3RPG is also limited to nine skills. The nice thing about this number is that it fits well into the “rule of threes” that has naturally emerged during development.

So, what are these Skills?

Hold your horses, I’m not going to just dump the list right now. You’ve gotta work for that, but it’s coming very soon, I promise.

It wouldn’t take a genius to realise that with three Attributes and nine skills, there’s a good-to-guaranteed chance that there are three Skills tied to each Attribute. And surprise surprise, said not-a-genius would be right.

This also allows a second relationship – each Attribute has one “Offensive” skill, one “Defensive” skill, and one “Utility” skill. Don’t get me wrong though – the use of the terms Offensive and Defensive shouldn’t be taken to be too narrow or traditional here. In a little more detail:

Offensive skills allow your character to impact and shape the world around them

Defensive skills represent your character’s ability to withstand changes in the world, both big and small

Utility skills are the requisite “everything else”.

There’s potentially a lot of overlap here, and if I’m going to squeeze in the potential actions you could take in an entire Universe then these Skills are necessarily going to have to be pretty broad.

But, finally, here they are. The nine Skills of d3RPG:

But what does that MEAN?

You’re a fussy lot, aren’t you? Fine. Here’s the current description of each skill from the jumble of notes that is the current rulebook.

The Mind skills deal with how you understand and relate to the world.

Awareness lets you take note of what is happening around you. Is there someone attempting to pick your pocket? Are you being stalked through the forest? Is the shopkeeper naturally nervous, or do those darting glances to the corner of his store indicate something else? Is that prickling on the back of your neck just sweat, or is someone targeting you with a spell? These are all examples of situations where Awareness is of great value.

Wisdom is the Old Wives Tales which don’t make logical sense, but bear results anyway. Not touching the spiny purple bush. Knowing to hide when you hear a bear approaching. Not antagonising someone who is much larger and more intimidating than you are. Wisdom is predominantly about survival and base instincts.

Knowledge is the opposite of Wisdom. It’s good-old “book learning”. It might represent your formal studies, or tidbits you have picked up while on the endless pub crawl that is your life. Regardless, your Knowledge skill represents the trivia and information that you have filed away for future reference. Who was the King of a neighbouring land 100 years ago? How much weight needs to be added to the counterbalance of the trebuchet to clear the Keep’s walls? Are these creatures before you more likely to be looking for a meal, or an easy way to get away from the people with swords? Knowledge provides answers that are objective and factual, and can answer all these questions and more.

The Body skills represent the manner in which you have trained your physical self.

Strength is predominantly brute power. The power of your arm when wielding a sword or the skill with which you can scale a cliff are both demonstrations of the Strength skill. Importantly, the better your Strength, the easier you will find it to connect with your opponents in battle.

Dexterity is useful for dodging incoming blows, balancing on a ledge, aiming a bow or even outrunning an opponent. Any time you need to make a decision and then act on it within a fraction of a second, that’s your dexterity at play.

Sneak represents your ability to finely control your bodily movements. Lifting a purse without being noticed. Stalking a wild boar without stepping on any noisy leaves or twigs. Hiding in the shadows of an alley to avoid pursuit. Using facial gestures during a conversation to convey a hidden message. Sneak can be used for nearly any sort of test when you don’t want your intentions to be known.

The Spirit skills are used by the you-shaped piece of the universe to impart its will on an uncaring existence.

Spellcraft represents the sheer power of your Will to impact the world. Typically, through the use of magic and spell casting. In some settings, the Storyteller may refer to this skill by a less-magical name, such as “Intuition” or “Psyche”. Regardless of the name used, use of this skill allows you to shape the world in ways that many people would view as impossible. It can also be used to recognise and understand the effect of magic and magical acts by others around you.

Resilience is how well you are able to withstand both positive and negative spiritual and emotional challenges. This may include events such as betrayal by your “friends”, revelation that you have followed a false god for your entire life, or the effects of a spell attempting to draw your lifeforce out of you.

Persuasion allows you to bend the will of others to your own. Your force of personality, your way with words, your raw charisma – these all combine to impact your skill at persuading others to do your bidding. Whether it’s knocking the price of a lovely bottle of wine down by a few gold pieces, talking a man-at-arms into following you into the dungeon, or convincing a nobleman that you’re the new chambermaid and not actually a burly criminal here to steal their trinkets. These acts all rely on your skills of Persuasion.

Nice. Great. Awesome. But how do I USE my Skills?

With a roll, of course. Sometimes the task you are attempting is so simple that you will automatically succeed, requiring no roll. However, many times in a gaming session the Storyteller is likely to ask you to make a Test of your skill. The default Target for these Tests is 10, although this number is regularly adjusted by either the Storyteller or the Rules.

To make a Skill Test, roll 3d3!1 + Skill + Perks (More on Perks another day). If the result meets or exceeds the Target, you are successful. There are no “critical” successes or failures in d3RPG. You either meet the target, or you do not. Simple!

Example: Gregory, from our previous article, is still very injured. Susan the Preacher goes to a temple to procure aid, and is told that medical services will cost 25 gold pieces, more than the party can afford.Susan tries to convince the temple healer to help a fellow member of the cloth by lowering their prices. The Storyteller instructs Susan to make a Persuade Test (mentally noting that the Target is only 9, as Susan and the healer do indeed share a religion). Susan has the Silver Tongue Perk, which allows her to add +1 to her Persuade roll when negotiating on price. She rolls (2 + 2 + 1) + 2 (Persuade) +1 (Silver Tongue) = 8 total.
The healer will not budge on their price. Things do not look good for Gregory.

Excellent! When do we play?

Not for quite a while yet, dear excited reader. There’s still a lot more to talk about. Perks. Magic. Equipment. Character Building. Adventures. But these can all wait for another day. In fact, some of these we might not get to for quite a while yet. For the next little while, weekly articles will continue with a shift in focus – some of the other projects that I’ve got going on at the moment. As much as I’m enjoying working on d3RPG, there’s a lot of other things that I have bubbling away in the melting pot of my mind that I want to talk about. We’ll get back to d3RPG soon though, I promise. And hopefully, we’ll find something else that you enjoy reading in the meantime!

]]>http://crackpot.studio/2018/04/28/d3rpg-skills-to-pay-the-bills/feed/1157d3RPG – Mind, Body and Spirithttp://crackpot.studio/2018/04/21/attributes-in-d3rpg-mind-body-and-spirit/
http://crackpot.studio/2018/04/21/attributes-in-d3rpg-mind-body-and-spirit/#respondFri, 20 Apr 2018 23:45:11 +0000http://crackpot.studio/?p=140Welcome back! This week’s d3RPG post is all about Attributes. Unlike other games you’re probably familiar with that have six major Attributes, d3RPG continues the theme of threes, and has just three Attributes for Mind, Body and Spirit.

Rather than recreating material from scratch for the sake of a blog post, I thought it would be easier just to give you the entire chapter on Attributes (as it currently stands, at least).

Although the following text, and indeed my signoff in the previous article, alludes to Skills as well, we’ll be keeping that for our next blog entry, instead.

So without further ado, here’s Chapter Two.

Chapter 2 – Attributes

Each character has three Attributes – Mind, Body and Spirit. Each of these Attributes is associated with three Skills. These Attributes and Skills are the “core” of your character.

Attributes

Attributes represent the reality of who a character is. Although they will increase as you adventure, they are not something that is “trained” as such. Rather, they are innate to the individual.

Mind is a representation of your mental abilities. If your Mind score ever drops to zero, you are mindless, insane, or otherwise incapable of directing your own actions. If left to your own devices, you will likely die soon. Probably from doing something as dumb as walking off a well-signposted cliff.

Body is a measure of your physical prowess. If your Body score every drops to zero, you are unconscious. Death is also probably not far away, but likely not of your own doing.

Spirit represents the weight of your presence in the universe. If your Spirit score is reduced to zero, you have succumbed to ennui or have otherwise given up hope of making it through the struggle that is life. Although you’re unlikely to seek out danger, you are equally unlikely to attempt to avoid danger that comes your way. Again, death is likely.

Attribute Values

Each Attribute has a Maximum Value (MV), and a Current Value (CV). Your Maximum value will increase over time as you spend Points on your Attributes. Your Current Value will drop over time as you suffer injuries to your mind, body and spirit. If your Current Value for an Attribute drops to certain levels, there can be major effects:

CV = 0 or more – you may be injured, but you cannot allow yourself to give up. Hold your ground, and fight! Or run. Running is sometimes a valid action.

CV = 0 – you are incapacitated. See the Attributes section above for an explanation of what this may mean. You are incapable of taking any actions of your own volition, except to Stabilize on your next turn (see below).

CV = -1 – you are on the verge of suffering permanent consequences. Your mind may be about to shatter into fragments, your blood flee from your body, or your spirit giving up and returning to whatever it is that makes up the universe. You are incapable of taking any actions of your own volition, except to Stabilize on your next turn (see below).

CV = -2or lower – with the last fragments of your broken body, fractured mind and failing will, you take an IMMEDIATE action to Stabilize. If you succeed, your Current Value increases by 1 point (eg, from -2 to -1). If you fail, you have succumbed to your injuries and trauma. You are dead. Roll up a new character!

Stabilizing

While there may be many ways to recover from damage – including spells, magical items, and good-old mundane medical attention – there is one that is always available to you, and that is to draw upon your own reserves to Stabilize.

Stabilizing allows you to increase the CV of one of your attributes by 1, and is capped at a CV of 1 (ie – you may only attempt a Stabilize Test if your Attribute CV is 0 or less). To make a Stabilize test, roll 3d3!1, and add the benefit of your Perks (if any apply to the situation).

A Stabilize test is always made against a Target of 10.

Example: Gregory the Knight has suffered a grievous wound and has a Body CV of 0. He falls to the ground. On Gregory’s turn, he uses his full action to roll a Stabilize check. He has the Great Fortutide Perk, allowing him to add +1 to his Body Stabilize checks.Gregory rolls (3 [+1] + 3 [+1] + 1) on the dice, for a total of 9. Adding his +1 for Great Fortitude brings him to 10.Gregory increases his Body CV to 1, shakily climbs to his feet, and raises his sword in defiance against his foe.

Next Time

Next week, I’ll have an article about Skills (I promise). From there, I can tell you a little about Perks. And while there will still be a lot (a LOT lot) missing from the overall picture, you should then have enough information to know whether d3RPG is something that is of interest to you, or if it’s not really your kettle of fish – which is perfectly fine!

Hopefully we’ll see you coming back for more, though. Let me know what else you’d like to see in future articles. Character creation? Sure. Levelling up? Classes? (Hint: You won’t see that. There are no classes or levels in this game!) Magic? Equipment? It’s up to you!

]]>http://crackpot.studio/2018/04/21/attributes-in-d3rpg-mind-body-and-spirit/feed/0140d3RPG – Exploding Dice and Probabilitieshttp://crackpot.studio/2018/04/14/d3rpg-exploding-dice-and-probabilities/
http://crackpot.studio/2018/04/14/d3rpg-exploding-dice-and-probabilities/#commentsFri, 13 Apr 2018 23:00:47 +0000http://crackpot.studio/?p=125I recently wrote to introduce d3RPG as a concept. I’ve been working on it a lot more than any other projects recently, because several others (that I haven’t introduced at all) are lacking in playtesting. There’s only so many opportunities to force my regular gaming group into testing things for me, but there’s always a chance for me to write more when there are no minions – uh, friends – available.

So today, we’re going to take a look at something called Exploding Dice, how they affect Probability, and how this works in d3RPG.

Statistics…? While still trying to build a core audience? Ugh.

Dice Notation

At the end of my last post, I promised more information about Exploding Dice, so that’s today’s topic. The concept of Exploding Dice is fairly straight forward, though, so I’ll also cover how this idea affects the probabilities encountered in d3RPG.

Firstly, though, we need to understand dice notation. Those of us familiar with RPGs are usually pretty comfortable using all these weird shaped pieces of plastic. But to many people, a six-sided die is the only die they’ve every used. News Flash: Dice can have more (or even less) than six sides! So how do we easily tell people what they need to roll?

“Roll your damage. It’s three six-sided dice, plus your strength modifier of 4” is not an overly-complicated sentence to parse or to speak. But in the written format, it takes an unnecessary amount of time and space to write. Instead, we use notation. The same instruction could be notated as “Damage: 3d6+4”. Much cleaner and easier. This can be abstracted to “XdY+Z”, where:

X = the number of dice being rolled. Occasionally if you are rolling a single die, the “1” is omitted, but it is good practice to include it to remove doubt or confusion.

Y = the number of sides on the dice. A common – but by no means exhaustive – list includes d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20.

Z = any other modifiers that apply. Depending on the system you are playing in, these may be based on many things including your weapon being used, your strength or dexterity score or the enchantments in place on your weapon.

Now, whenever I use dice notation, you’ll hopefully have no issues understanding what all that gobbledygook means.

What are Exploding Dice?

I’m sure the idea exists in many other game systems, but I must recognise Savage Worlds as the ruleset that introduced me to the idea. If you are playing with Exploding Dice, then whenever you roll a die and it comes up at it’s maximum value (6 on a d6, for example), you get to reroll that die, and add the results together. That’s it, really. Super simple, but really fun in game.

Let’s say you’re rolling 2d6, and you roll a 4 and a 6. That’s a total of 10 – well above average for 2d6 (which is 7, by the way). But because the 6 you rolled is the maximum possible on that die, you get to roll it again. This reroll might give you a 3. You now have 4 + 6 (+3) = 13 total, on just two dice. You can easily and quickly see (probably even without the benefit of my example) that this total of 13 is higher than would be possible if you were just rolling dice as per normal. 2d6 can only roll up to 12, after all.

And THAT is where the excitement of Exploding Dice comes in. In a system like Savage Worlds, there is a possibility – no matter how small – that you could succeed on ANY roll, because there is no limit to the number of times a die can explode!

Sticking with the familiar d6’s, one theoretical roll with a single Exploding Die could be 6 (+6) (+6) (+3) = 21. A single six-sided die giving a result of 21?! Impossible! Not with Exploding Dice, though, just highly improbable (Rolling three 6’s in a row is a 1:216 chance, or a little less than 0.5%). It can be crazy fun!

To notate Exploding Dice, we just add an exclamation point to the dice formula: “2d8!” means to roll two eight-sided dice, rerolling and adding the results of any 8’s you roll.

Exploding Dice in d3RPG

When I decided I wanted to use d3’s for this game (it’s in the name, after all) it was pretty obvious to me pretty quickly that if players were to roll any specific quantity of d3’s, then the range of results was going to be fairly narrow. There could only possibly be a three-fold difference between the minimum roll, and the maximum.

3d3 Min = 3, Max = 9

6d3 Min = 6, Max = 18

10d3 Min = 10, Max = 30

etc

This didn’t strike me as particularly exciting. But at the same time, I didn’t want a huuuge range as is possible in most d20-based systems.

When I considered the use of Exploding Dice, it suddenly gave me a wider range of possible outcomes. Initially, and until now, I have been considering limiting the “explode depth” to 1 (That is, each die can only explode once). During further number crunching while writing this very blog post, though, I’m starting to think that might be an artificial limit. It bears thinking about further.

Instead of trying to describe the difference between 3d3 and 3d3! in words, a pretty little chart might do a better job. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.

Chart showing probability of rolling a given value – incorporates both regular and exploding dice. Click for larger image.

You can see that regular dice rolls (orange) cluster in a neat little bell curve, while the Exploding Dice (blue) have a much longer tail, showing how higher values can be obtained at the expense of making individual results far less likely.

Of course, most RPGs require you to roll against a target of some description – the most basic example is when making an attack against a creature. Whenever you roll to attack, you are usually aiming to beat their Armor Class, Toughness, or other similar term, depending on the system you are playing. When I combined a range of potential bonuses (bonii?) to compare them to various possible results, this is what I got:

You can see in the chart above that I have highlighted the “Target 10” row. After considering the probabilities in conjunction with the “difficulty” I wanted in the game I decided a good default target would be 10. Not only does it make sense from the probabilities perspective, but it’s an easy number to remember. Of course, the Storyteller (aka, Gamemaster, Judge etc… take your pick) will modify the target regularly, and various features of targeted foes (Skills and Perks – more on those in another post) will adjust the target too. If you were only ever rolling against a Target of 10, things would get pretty stale pretty quickly.

When interpreting the chart, simply find the column that shows the total Bonuses and Penalties that apply to the roll, and the row that shows the Target. Where they intersect will tell you the character’s chance of succeeding in their attempts at… well, doing whatever they’re trying to do.

Phew!

And that’s really it for now. I don’t know how enlightening this will be to those of you who haven’t seen anything else in the core rules yet (That is, the population of the world, minus myself and one other person). But I felt an outline of the central mechanic was probably warranted early on in the piece.

Before I actually go, though, a quick shoutout. Manually calculating all the probabilities for Exploding Dice would give me a case of Exploding Brain. Luckily, there’s an awesome website called anydice.com which does ALL the maths for you. I literally could not have gotten as far along with designing this game as I have without them. You should totally check them out.

Next time I write about d3RPG I think we should take a look at another core aspect of (pretty much) any RPG: Attributes and Skills. Come back and join the fun then!

]]>http://crackpot.studio/2018/04/14/d3rpg-exploding-dice-and-probabilities/feed/2125New Project – d3RPGhttp://crackpot.studio/2018/04/12/new-project-d3rpg/
http://crackpot.studio/2018/04/12/new-project-d3rpg/#commentsThu, 12 Apr 2018 08:32:20 +0000http://crackpot.studio/?p=118Well, it’s about time I made it back here. I promised myself (and I guess anyone who’s reading) that I’d start putting my ideas out in public a bit more, and they’re not going to do it themselves!

The idea that’s taken all my time recently – to the point that I haven’t been able to sleep several nights in the last week – is d3RPG. It’s a roleplaying game that is designed to be simple enough to hear about the game for the first time, and be playing 10 minutes later (INCLUDING character creation).

Well, that’s the idea. Let’s see how well it works when it’s eventually all said and done.

I’m a big fan of the Pathfinder RPG, published by Paizo – one of the crunchier games currently out there. Which is a bit of an odd place to start your RPG obsession. It usually makes more sense to eeeeeaaaase yourself into something. Not to jump headlong into the maw of a two tonne shark. But that’s not how I operate. Clearly. Pathfinder was my very first RPG experience, thanks to the bundle put out a while back by the folks at Humble Bundle. (They’re really cool dudes. You should definitely check them out.)

A smorgasboard of nearly-free PDFs has led to a significant collection of books, given the small timespan involved.

It’s not the size that counts. It’s how you use it. But… I *really* want it to be bigger!

Since then, I’ve played in or run games in a few different systems, but nothing like the laundry-list of games that many longterm players have experienced:

A couple of those systems (Hero Kids and Savage Worlds) were tried specifically because I’ve also got a couple of kids running around at home (6 and 9 as of right now) who are champing at the bit to get involved in Dad’s hobby.

So with only a handful of systems under my belt, and less years playing than I have systems, what makes me qualified to write my own RPG? Good question. Nothing at all. But I’m doing it anyway, because my brain gets these ideas, and my pride won’t let me realise that they’re usually dumb ideas.

But also because of the small children I just mentioned. They want to play everything I play, which is awesome! But so many of the systems out there are too complex for them. And the ones that are designed for kid accessibility are not really detailed enough to hold the attention of some older folks like myself (at least, that I am aware of at this point). So I set myself the lofty goal of bridging that gap, despite never having tightrope-walked before. Fun times!

Now I find myself buried deep in system design for a d3-based system. Yep, those weird-lookin’ 3 sided dice. There are three reasons (coincidentally) that I picked d3’s as the core:

The fun reason is because I’m not aware of something like this existing, so there’s a lot of unexplored design space to work in.

The boring reason is that using one type of dice allows me to have a single probability table (*yawn*).